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Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly

Trevor, whose recent books include Fools of Fortune and A Writer's Ireland, adds to his formidable reputation with this fine collection. The stories here depict ordinary people in mundane situations, but the author's insight into the human condition, coupled with his clean, spare prose, makes these characters and their predicaments vibrant and memorable. The title story tells of a young English woman who arrives in Ireland in 1847 to be governess in the home of the Protestant Pulvertaft family, whose estate is being restored to its former glory while the potato famine ravages the rest of the country. The governess agonizes over several moral questions, and over a decision that will change her life. Set in London, Venice, Florence and rural Ireland, these 12 tales have a quiet but resonating power that tug at the heart. (May 12)

Library Journal

These richly detailed dramas of small actions with large consequences will enhance any general fiction collection. These are stories of lost love, hope, and innocence, turning on a misinterpreted phrase or a misplaced handbag. Friendships split as revenge is taken on a Joycean scholar or is exacted by a lexicographer's daughter, in both cases destroying a life's work. The impossible love of two young girls for a dying boy becomes the wedge that leaves them passing strangerstourists, as many here, in their own lives. The stories are set in Ireland, England, and Italy; and the ``news'' from every quarter seems to be that no one escapes the evocative powers of memory, no one the past. Peter Bricklebank, English Dept., City Coll., CUNY

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Meet the Author

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William Trevor

Known for moving, haunting novels such as Felicia's Journey and Fools of Fortune, Irish author William Trevor is also known as a master of the short story genre. As the New York Times Book Review noted, Trevor "moves between the short story and the novel; Irish settings and English; the capitalized Troubles of his native land and the personal lowercase ones of his characters." He does so with unwavering skill.

Biography

"William Trevor is an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence," Brooke Adams once wrote in the New York Times Book Review. Hailed by the New Yorker as "probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language," Trevor has also written over a dozen acclaimed novels as well as several plays. His characters are often people whose desires have been unfulfilled, and who come to rely on various forms of self-deception and fantasy to make their lives bearable.

Trevor was born in 1928 to a middle-class, Protestant family in Ireland. After graduating from Trinity College with a degree in history, he attempted to carve out a career as a sculptor. He moved to England in 1954 and exhibited his sculptures there; he also wrote his first novel, A Standard of Behavior, which was published in 1958 but met with little critical success. His second novel, The Old Boys, won the 1964 Hawthornden Prize for Literature and marked the beginning of a long and prolific career as a novelist, short-story writer and playwright.

Three of Trevor's novels have won the prestigious Whitbread Novel of the Year Award: The Children of Dynmouth, Fools of Fortune and Felicia's Journey. Felicia's Journey, about a pregnant Irish girl who goes to England to find the lover who abandoned her, was adapted for the screen in 1999 by director Atom Egoyan. Trevor, who has described himself as a short-story writer who enjoys writing novels, has also written such celebrated short stories as "Three People," in which a woman who murdered her disabled sister harbors an unspoken longing for the man who provided her with an alibi, and "The Mourning," about a young man who is pressed by political activists into planting a bomb (both from The Hill Bachelors).

Some critics have noted a change in Trevor's work over the years: his early stories tend to contain comic sketches of England, while his later ones describe Ireland with the elegiac tone of an expatriate. Trevor, who now lives in Devon, England, has suggested that he has something of an outsider's view of both countries. "I feel a sense of freshness when I come back [to Ireland]," he said in a 2000 Irish radio interview. "If I lived in, say, Dungarvan or Skibbereen, I think I wouldn't notice things."

As it stands, Trevor is clearly a writer who notices things, just as one of his characters notices "the glen and the woods and the seashore, the flat rocks where the shrimp pools were, the room she woke up in, the chatter of the hens in the yard, the gobbling of the turkeys, her footsteps the first marks on the sand when she walked to Kilauran to school" (The Story of Lucy Gault). Yet as Trevor told an interviewer for The Irish Times, "You mustn't write about what you know. You must use your imagination. Fiction is an act of the imagination." Trevor's fertile imagination captures, as Alice McDermott wrote in The Atlantic, "the terrible beauty of Ireland's fate, and the fate of us all -- at the mercy of history, circumstance, and the vicissitudes of time."

Good To Know

When Trevor was growing up, he wanted to be a clerk in the Bank of Ireland -- following in the footsteps of his father, James William Cox. Cox's career as a bank manager took the family all over Ireland, and Trevor attended over a dozen different schools before entering Trinity College in Dublin.

Trevor married his college sweetheart, Jane Ryan, in 1952. After the birth of their first son, Trevor worked for a time as an advertising copywriter in London. He also sculpted and worked as an art teacher, but gave up his sculpting after it became "too abstract."

In addition to the 1999 film Felicia's Journey, two other movies have been based on Trevor's works: Fools of Fortune (1990), directed by Pat O'Connor, and Attracta (1983), directed by Kieran Hickey. According to Trevor's agent, the plays Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria are also being adapted for the screen.

Trevor is also the author of several plays, most of which are not in print in the U.S. Works include Scenes from an Album, Marriages, and Autumn Sunshine.

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